1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to an acoustic music box and, more particularly, to an electronic digital acoustic music engine utilizing magnetic actuation to cause “plucking” of musical tines.
2. Description of the Related Art
Music Boxes have been around for hundreds of years. The pure and gentle sound of plucked metal tines resonating in a suitable surrounding box or sculpture is a warm and familiar experience for millions. Despite the recent revolutionary development of extremely inexpensive digital integrated circuits used to create music and sounds in all kinds of consumer products and toys, the old-fashioned music box persists. The sound is unique and still not trivial to duplicate inexpensively using other technology.
To produce that unmistakable sound, there have been many types and generations of mechanisms created over the years, but they all rely upon the same mechanical event to produce a tone: the plucking of a tuned metal tine by a passing pin or similar structure.
Apart from the sound, there has been more variety and inventiveness applied toward increasing the number of songs a music box can produce. Multiple tines tuned to different notes are typically contained on a “comb” positioned for contact with the passing pins. While many music box mechanisms operate by means of cylinders bristling with metal pins rotating adjacent to the tine comb, this has the significant disadvantages of limiting the song to the one cylinder as well as limiting the length of that song to the time it takes for the cylinder to rotate once fully around. Some mechanisms have employed replaceable cylinders, which solves the first problem, but not the second. Another variation employs replaceable metal or plastic disks having integrally-molded pins extending from a surface and positioned for contact with a tine comb. Such a system, however, has the exact same limitations as the replacement cylinders but whose disks are much cheaper to produce, insert or replace. Another variation employs a foldable length of punched paper tape driven past a plucking mechanism. This variation vastly increases the number of melodies or songs played, but requires that they be played in sequence as the length of punched paper traverses the plucking mechanism. This variation also requires the precise feeding of an end of the paper tape into the player—a somewhat cumbersome task—and also requires significant storage space for multiple tapes, e.g., retail storage space for stacking punched tapes containing various melodies, and user storage space for storing a plurality of purchased tapes. There have been other variations, too, that address these limitations in different ways, but usually more complicated, unreliable and excessively mechanical in nature.
More generally, most such mechanical systems are limited in their musical agility: an ability to produce multiple notes both simultaneously, sequentially and precisely in time. If a mechanism tries to pluck too many tines at once, it can become mechanically loaded and then stall, while the precision of note placement in time, for rapid “arpeggios” and scale runs is limited by the mechanical precision of pins or holes in disks or paper tape. In addition, such prior art mechanical music boxes do not provide for variations in volume of selected notes or other special articulation and accent effects. Specifically, because of the relative position between a pin and a corresponding tine, the pin will engage the tine at precisely the same way for every occurrence, thereby producing a consistent note volume. While this is desirable for most occasions, in some situations it would be preferred to have a technique for varying the volume of the plucked notes.
It is also recognized that a music box system can be readily developed using a solenoid-driven pin reconfiguration technique on a rotating drum to strike tines on a comb. Such a system will allow for the playing of multiple melodies as dictated by the pin configurations. However, such a system will suffer from many of the drawbacks of the prior art as well as additional drawbacks. For example, such a system will require a relatively large amount of power, be more costly to the consumer, will present a significant mechanical drain on the rotating drum and motor, have low reliability, and require excess precision in order to play the selected melodies.